Brad DeLong posts the lyrics to “Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye,” the cruel Irish (perhaps originally Scots) ballad whose tune was converted in the more cheerful “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.”
But Brad quotes it with a final stanza that I had never heard, that doesn’t appear in the version published in Padraic Colum’s 1922 collection, and that does not seem to match the rest of the song in either sentiment or prosody:
They’re rolling out the guns again, hurroo, hurroo
They’re rolling out the guns again, hurroo, hurroo
They’re rolling out the guns again
But they never will take our sons again
No they never will take our sons again
Johnny I’m swearing to ye.
Note that, unlike all the other stanzas, this one has no variation in the rhyming words, and repeats its last verse, which itself limps rather badly.
The song is about a woman whose lover has left her and their child to follow the drums, and has come home a cripple. It has no hint that he was “taken”; she says “Why did ye skedaddle from me and the child?” If the song (other than the stanza in question) has an anti-war message, it’s human, not a political: the anger is at the glory-seeking runaway, not at some amorphous “them” who have “taken our sons.”
So I suspect an addition, perhaps circa 1966. Can anyone verify or refute my suspicion? And can anyone date the original? Is “the island of Sulloon” a reference to Ceylon? Did the British ever face hard fighting on Ceylon?
Update Yes they did, says a reader, in 1795-96. Mike O’Hare provides a link to a more recent anti-war song.
Second update Yes, that last stanza was added by a buddy of Pete Seeger in the 1950s.